You write a short story the way you read a short story.
As quickly as possible.
The best way to read a short story is to read it in one sitting.
Reading a short story in one sitting it easy enough. You typically only have one plot line to follow. You have a small range of characters, the main one and maybe a handful of others. There’s only one main idea. And the length of even a long short story should only take a slow reader around half-an-hour to finish.
Short stories aren’t more than around 10,000 words.
That’s the cut-off word count for many short story competitions, like the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and magazine submission guidelines.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote long short stories – ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, one of the greatest short stories in all of gothic literature, is 7,225 words.
On the shorter end of the short story spectrum, you have Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Baby Shoes’, which clocks in at a grand total of 6 words long. So short, we can reprint it in its entirety here:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Though many would argue that’s not a short story, but rather a piece of flash fiction. Flash fiction is typically defined as being under 1,000 words.
When you get over 10,000 words, by the way, you start getting into novelette/novella territory. A novelette will take you between 10,000 and 20,000 words, while a novella is anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 words. After that you start writing novels. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, at 33,000 words, is a novella. So is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea at 27,000 words.
You read short stories in a single sitting because you want total and complete immersion in the world you’ve just been dropped into.
Your aim is to become at home in the world. Befriend the characters. Let them into your heart. Don’t judge anything or anyone. At least not immediately. Not until you have properly lived in the world. Seek first to understand before you start passing judgement. You want to let the short story work on your imagination. This advice is straight out of Mortimer Adler’s seminal How to Read a Book:
A story is like life itself.
You likely won’t be able to write a short story as quickly as you can read a short story. But you can, and likely should, still write your short story in a single sitting.
Of course, it depends how long your short story is, how long you can remain sitting, and whether the passion with which your short narrative whips you up can carry you from beginning to end at hurtling locomotive speed.
It takes most writers (and, by that, I mean the seasoned average veteran writer who has clocked at least half-a-million words) roughly one hour to write 1,000 words. You might do more, you might do less. Stephen King does around that, and, in his great work on the craft On Writing, claimed a typical work day to result in 10 pages, or 2,000 words. Anthony Trollope, who wrote huge novels before he went to work at the British Post Office where he would create the iconic red pillar boxes, used to put his wristwatch on the table in front of him and aim to write 250 words per 15 minutes. He stopped after 2 hours, went to work, and returned to his story the next morning.
So, if your short story is on the shorter or middle word count end, you’ll have it finished in a few hours. You’ll have the first draft finished at least.
If you’re short story is approaching Edgar Allen Poe lengths, you’ll probably want to divide your writing into two shifts in order to preserve concentration and focus. But try to put those two shifts as close together as possible. That might look like you writing for a couple of hours first thing in the morning with a strong cup of coffee, taking a few hours to have lunch and exercise, then making use of a second wind in the afternoon to finish your short story off. Or it might mean you write some of your short story today and some of it tomorrow.
Write as fast as possible.
Don’t let your inner editor, inner judge, inner censor get involved.
You’re not worried about quality when you’re writing your first draft. You’re riding on instinct.
Ray Bradbury, who wrote a heck of a lot of great short stories, over 600 of them (check out his The Illustrated Man collection), talked about exploding like a rocket across the page in the morning, then cleaning it up in the afternoon. That’s what you want to do. Be like a child at play when you’re writing your first draft. Write like crazy. Then tidy things later.
Bradbury challenged young authors to write a short story a week. I know he wouldn’t have taken his own advice though, because Bradbury was clearly writing many of his great short stories in a single afternoon during his prolific prime.
Don’t confuse taking your time with literary quality. Some of the best works of literature were written quickly. I can name hundreds, from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
It’s a myth that writing needs to be a slow and painful.
It should be quick and fun.
Do some writers labour endlessly over their work? Sure. Alice Munro is one of the best short story writers around and she typically takes a month, sometimes a few months, to write a short story. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write a short story in a day.
Now what will your short story be about?
That’s the question.
Whatever you decide to write about, you can’t go wrong if you keep two things in mind.
One, you need to be passionate, driven, excited, and compelled to get it down on paper for others to read.
And two, short stories are typically about just one thing, one idea, one moment. This one event is a pivotal event.
In a way, a short story is quite like a chapter near the end of a novel. There’s no build-up, exposition, or background. All that’s stripped away. You begin as close to the earth-shattering event as possible. You might want to put this great event, this huge idea, right at the beginning of the short story. If you do that, the rest of the short story is spent with the characters dealing with the fallout of what’s happened. You could also put it in the middle. Quick crescendo, boom, then fallout. Or if you choose to put it at the end of your short story, make sure you’ve got a delicious twist.
Readers love a great twist in their short stories.
They think things are going to go one way and, wrong! They zag in a completely unexpected direction.
If you want to get good at delivering twists, watch a lot of old Twilight Zone episodes. Also watch The Ray Bradbury Mystery Theatre. Watch Black Mirror too for something current. And read the short stories of Roald Dahl, Chuck Palahniuk, Shirley Jackson. Take Neil Gaiman’s Writing MasterClass and pay careful attention to the module on writing short fiction in which Gaiman shows you how short stories are like close-up magic tricks.
Sometimes you don’t always want the twist, the momentous event, the shocking moment to be right in your face. The best short stories are often crafted with subtlety and subtext. Read Hemingway’s short stories. The word ‘abortion’ is unbelievably not mentioned once in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. Read the short stories of Raymond Carver and John Cheever. And, whilst you’re doing your reading, make sure you savour plenty of stories from Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and O. Henry. They’ll show you what short stories are all about. I always believed that novels were like orange trees, short stories like oranges, and poems like juice. You’ll see oranges with perfectly sweet segments when you read those writers. You’ll wonder if you can ever breed a fruit so bursting with flavour.
But where do you get your ideas for short stories?
If you don’t already have more ideas than you know what to do with, you’ll have to train that part of your creative mind.
Write down ten ideas for short stories right now.
Don’t judge. None of them have to be good. You don’t have to be faithful to any of them. You’re just oiling the engine. Then tomorrow write down ten ideas for themes that you’d like to explore. The day after that maybe you write down ten potential character sketches. Then ten more short stories ideas, this time picking a genre, trying to challenge yourself. Then write down ten things you loved as a child and ten things you hated (that’s a Ray Bradbury writing exercise). Then maybe you write ten short stories ideas that could work as responses to short stories you’ve recently read. What would your response be to that short story by Katherine Mansfield? Or the short story you loved by Edith Wharton? What about that short story that haunted you by Washington Irving?
Keep a notebook, one that you’re simultaneously proud of and also not afraid to get dirty.
Remember also that the best short stories are all condensed to this simple formula: somebody wants something, but something is stopping them from getting it.
Intention and obstacle, as Aaron Sorkin would say.
- What does your character want?
- Why do they want it?
- Why now?
- What’s stopping them?
- And what are they going to do about it?
That’s how you write a short story a day.
In condensed form, I’ll give you my personal process. Here’s how to write a short story in a day:
- Get an idea. You might already be swimming in them. If not, jot down 10 ideas for stories right now. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself. Just get the ideas down. One of them is sure to appeal to you. If none of them appeal to you, jot down another 10.
- Complete a rough outline. Some authors prefer to dive straight in but I find having a sense of direction will allow your writing to flow more smoothly. My short stories usually have three arcs, with a significant peak being one of those arcs, and the characters all want something. Find out what your characters want and how their desires conflict with the desires of the other characters.
- Nail the theme. Good short stories have a central metaphor than can be summed up in a sentence.
- Give yourself a block of time and commit to a word count. You can even use Trollope’s method of 250 words per 15 minutes.
And here’s a short story reading and writing program you could follow for the rest of the year:
If you have an endless book budget, the kind of finances bibliophiles the world over envy, you should be having new volumes turn up on your doorstep all the time.
Specifically, you want a new volume of short stories every week. Treasure these volumes. Opt for cohesive wholes put together by single authors rather than anthologies. These gems are like albums from revered musicians. When Alice Munro’s debut short story collection Dance of the Happy Shades turns up at your house one week, and you leave a bookstore with Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and Other Stories the next, you treat them like that coveted album by Led Zeppelin or David Bowie, dutifully give them the first listen, then replay them again and again throughout the week. Or, if you don’t have a penny to your name, get yourself a library card and never leave its grand book-lined walls. Deshelve any collection that takes your fancy.
On top of this reading assignment, read as much as you can outside of short fiction. Epics, poems, plays, essays. Talk to everyone and debate everything. Especially with children. And listen to music. Go to art galleries. Take note of your dreams. And write! Write when the spirit moves you, but keep office hours and write every day at the same time too.
Now, tell me: